Missouri officials toyed with inmates during parole hearings

Greitens’ spokesman Parker Briden declined immediate comment. David Owen, a corrections department spokesman, said in an email that the agency had no comment.

In one hearing, the analyst told a sex offender, “Your grandma would probably be like, he ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, you know it.” The analyst also warned the offender that if he kept up his behaviour, he might be placed in the sexually violent predator unit and might as well learn “Folsom Prison Blues.”

“It is shameful and outrageous that after an internal investigation, reports to the highest level of the Parole Board, and undisputed findings that Ruzicka literally played games with legal hearings he was supposed to be supervising – that this man is still allowed to decide upon the course of people’s lives,” said Mae Quinn, the director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at St. Louis, in a news release that also demanded the creation of an oversight group and an audit to “discern the depths of the problems.”

Ruzicka, a former conservation agent and Republican state representative from Mount Vernon who began his term on the parole board in December 2012, doesn’t have a listed number. According to the report, he told an investigator that the parole hearings were “thorough and complete” despite the game, which he said “wasn’t a lengthy continuous thing.”

“It happened and it was over. … Maybe that little check in here (he was pointing to his chest) was to move on. We didn’t discuss ending it, it just kinda ended,” Ruzicka told the investigator.

The parole analyst who participated in the game said he and Ruzicka thought the game would “lighten the mood and change it up.” The analyst said they “quit doing it because it was not good practice and it was unprofessional.”

The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Missouri officials toyed with inmates during parole hearings

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